The temple's modern history includes a serious act of violence: in January 1998, during Sri Lanka's civil war, a truck bomb attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam exploded at the temple's entrance, killing several people and severely damaging the building's facade and roof, an attack widely understood as targeting the relic's symbolic importance to the Sinhalese Buddhist state rather than any purely military objective. The relic itself, kept deep within the building's nested chambers, survived undamaged, and the temple was subsequently restored.
The tooth's authenticity, like other tooth relics claimed elsewhere in this atlas, most notably at Lingguang Temple in Beijing, has never been settled by independent physical examination, since the relic is not removed from its sequence of caskets for scientific study and is displayed to the public, when displayed at all, only briefly and from a distance. Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition treats the relic's documented arrival in the fourth century CE and its unbroken royal custody since as sufficient grounds for its veneration, a position of faith rather than one resting on forensic verification, and the temple's own presentation reflects that position rather than claiming scientific proof it has not sought.